Medicinal Fiction

on tradwives, smut, and Brian Evenson (plus, Palestinian fiction recs)

In the decades following its invention, the novel form and its readers were denigrated, associated with feminine indiscipline and frivolity. The form was viewed as a kind of weapon lobbed into the delicate minds of young women, filling them with various notions of sexuality and sensationalism and violence. 

You can see the negotiation of these attitudes in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, which is a kind of tribute to, or satire of, novel-reading: its protagonist is a young woman so addicted to reading novels that she can no longer differentiate between real life and the spine-chilling gothics she adores. She frightens and amuses and embarrasses herself, developing ridiculous preoccupations and paranoias, interpreting mundane everyday events through a cracked lens like a true-crime obsessive convinced she’s being human-trafficked because a stranger talked to her in a park.

Today, though, novels are medicine. On social media, over the last several weeks, I’ve seen numerous food/beauty/wellness influencers exhorting their fans to read fiction (which, in this case, almost always means novels). The suggestion might come in the form of a slideshow, titled something like “How to get out of a winter funk,” or “How to decrease your cortisol levels.” The first slide tells you to ingest saffron every morning because it has antidepressant effects. The second tells you to take hot baths or do pilates. And the third tells you to read fiction. Often, there’s a footnote or caption. It tells you that fiction has been scientifically shown to lower stress or depression, or to increase empathy or strengthen attention.

I don’t doubt it. When I am in a bad or depressed mood, reading good fiction is often the thing that will lift me out of it. My life is better when I read lots of fiction. I feel a sensation of mental expansion and freedom when I read good novels. Oh! I think: You can make things up! You can invent! You can use language that way! I forgot!

A few months ago I started reading Brian Evenson’s short story “Born Stillborn” in the bath. I read the first sentence: 

“Haupt’s therapist had started coming to him at night as well, and even though Haupt knew, or at least suspected, that the man wasn’t really there, wasn’t really standing beside his bed with pencil in hand, listening to him and writing notes on the wall about what he said, he seemed real.”

As I read this sentence I sat up straight, laughing, a tingling high coming over my body. I felt elated, like someone had lifted an enormous weight from my shoulders. As Evenson himself wrote in the essay “Doing Without”:

“Fiction is exceptionally good at providing models for consciousness, and at putting readers in a position to take upon themselves the structure of another consciousness for a short while.”

But it’s strange, isn’t it? That there was a time, not all that long ago, when the novel was seen as a problematic influence on young women. Now, it is healthy for us, and will make us better. It goes almost without saying that this medicinal-fiction content is produced overwhelmingly by and for young women. Within the Venn diagram of online beauty content & online health content & online self-improvement content, there is a lot of overlap, and the kind of content in which medicinal fiction appears is usually smack in the middle. The novel is slipped in alongside things like collagen powder, things that make you more beautiful. Fiction is something that will make you feel happier, with the end goal of molding you into a more perfect female specimen: relaxed, smooth, cultured, and productive.

the 18th century feminine love of novels was variously referred to as “reading fever,” “reading lust,” “reading mania,” etc.

It’s at this point that I have to stop myself. I threw “productive” on that list because it seemed, superficially, to fit. But it isn’t quite right. The novel is not being positioned as productive. Rather, it is being celebrated as medicinal because it is not productive. It is a source of rest. Like yoga or skincare or REM sleep, it is something unproductive that the aspirational, productive woman does in her free time so that she can later be productive again. They are two halves of a whole.

I’ve been obsessed with Victorian domesticity lately. Maybe it’s because I can’t stop reading A.S. Byatt, but there’s something riveting to me about the borderline-neurotic hoarding of little trinkets, the obsessive dedication to coziness, that characterized much of 19th-century domestic space. This obsession with coziness is inextricable from the simultaneous hardening of gender roles in the period. In the Victorian model of the middle-class family, it was the man’s job to go out into the world to make money and participate in politics. The woman stays back and runs the household and raises the children, creating a perfect, feminine, happy home, a place of rest for the man. This place of rest with the wife at its center is precisely what allows the man to exit and conquer the marketplace/colony, and the man’s success out in the workplace enables the purchase of a million little trinkets, not to mention domestic help, to create comfort at home. In other words, the feminine domestic sphere is not the opposite of the masculine public one, but rather an integral part of it, a balance that keeps it upright, the other half of the whole.

there’s something about it idk!

Our current moment rhymes with that one. Right now the home, packed with mass-produced stuff dropshipped and delivered from every corner of the empire, is an object of neurotic fetishization and aspiration. It’s most explicit in the figure of the tradwife, who, like her Victorian counterpart, appears to embody a total separateness from the crude public space of the market while actually participating in it vigorously (the Victorian wife via both her husband and her consumption habits, the online tradwife by working as a paid influencer and posting her hauls for the public to watch). 

But there is also a certain separate-spheres sensibility to the concept of medicinal fiction. Medicinal fiction lives within the universe of the private and deeply controlled home, a place of complex and uninterrupted routines: cherry juice, supplements, everything shower, prescribed bedtime reading. This obsessively cultivated domestic peace enables the woman to continue being productive later, either on the sexual marketplace or on the literal one (in this case the Victorian spheres are embodied by a single person, who cultivates coziness at home in order to rest after her own workday and prepare for the next).

Implicitly, then, the fiction-as-medicine notion breaks the world into two spheres. One is the novelistic, feminine, and comforting/comfortable. The other is the nonfictional, masculine, and productive. They are separate but of a piece, with the former fitting into the logic of the latter. Thus, when the influencer recommends the reading of medicinal fiction, she both refers to and reinforces this split: you must cultivate the feminized benefits of novel-reading to complement and license the masculine outcomes, the hard monetizable skills, of nonfiction reading. This makes sense because, while there is a lot of inventive and literary and expansive and imaginative nonfiction in the world, much popular nonfiction is stubbornly unimaginative. If not literally self-help, then it’s basically geared toward improving the reader by injecting them full of useful facts and concepts without regard for anything as frivolous as their experiential enjoyment. In other words, the primary experience of popular nonfiction right now is not leisure but productivity.

In the seventeenth century, as Europeans brought home the spoils of empire, they began drinking coffee and chocolate by the ton. The scholar Wolfgang Schivelbusch argued that these Europeans’ choices of beverage took on moral and political valences. Protestant Europe opted for coffee, for the productivity of the caffeinated brain, for the public, male-dominated Enlightenment coffeehouse. Catholic Europe had a preference for chocolate, which came to be associated with the private sphere, with the leisure and femininity and sexuality of the boudoir. Both were part of the same universe of trade and empire, but they assumed different symbolic roles: two halves of a whole. In the discourse of medicinal fiction, fiction is chocolate, and nonfiction is coffee. They are separate, but they are not remotely in conflict. The fiction lives in the discursive world created and dominated by the self-help-ified nonfiction.

These are the first images that come up when you search "18th century chocolate" and "18th century coffee," so there you go

Recently, my friend Mitali and I have been in an ongoing conversation about the word smut. With the recent surge in the popularity of romance fiction, everyone is suddenly talking about smut, recommending books on the basis that they contain smut. What, we kept asking ourselves, differentiates smut from (on the one hand) porn, and (on the other hand) a regular sex scene? We had dinner with a bigger group of friends and asked them what they thought about it. “It sounds Victorian,” said one friend, and he was right, I realized. The word is bizarrely old-fashioned, pulled back from the nearly-extinct. It calls to mind a Victorian grandmother clutching her pearls. Another word I have seen used online in place of the words porn/sex is, horrifyingly, spice. If smut is redolent of Victorian squeamishness around sex, of the gendered spheres of the nineteenth-century family, then (in my current state of mind) spice calls to mind the slave trade and the spice trade, the aestheticized and gendered coffee and chocolate raked in by the greedy animal of empire. 

Spice and smut also remind me of Amazon search terms. They are not so much descriptors as they are key words to help guide a recommendation algorithm to safe harbor, so that the reader discovers a new iteration of precisely that which she has enjoyed before. She can avoid unpleasant surprises. I imagine a drop-down list of categories: fiction, nonfiction, sci-fi, YA, smut—neat and predictable categorizations. These words contain and defang the charged and dangerous realm of the erotic in fiction, fitting it neatly to the marketplace. 

I’ll return for a moment to that essay of Brian Evenson’s, which is largely about writers who choose to subtract narrative and formal scaffolding (think plot information, but also think chapter titles, or quotation marks). He writes:

“What is subtracted is the significance and meaning designed to let us classify an experience without entering into it. Doing without such things opens the door wider for experience, putting the reader in a position where they are experiencing fiction in lieu of understanding it… we refuse to let fiction be assimilable, digestible, and safe.”

The concept of medicinal fiction, and the proliferation of a keyword-driven vocabulary to describe it, is a sign of a fiction that is classified rather than experienced—one read for the promise of familiar attributes and clear benefits. But if fiction has antidepressant qualities for me, it is precisely because of its capacity to surprise, to corner me into something so strange that it jolts me into experience and out of the classifications I usually depend upon. 

Maybe things have not in fact changed very much from the time when novels were denigrated as a worrisome, frivolous feminine craze. The surge of medicinal fiction suggests a recognition that fiction is indeed dangerous: it has the capacity to addle our minds, to blur lines between the real and the fictional, to bring us into experiences we otherwise are barred from. It threatens to draw us in, to absorb us. That is why it has to be contained. Medicinal fiction nullifies what is surprising in the novel, splitting it into bits like so many supplements in a sleekly branded bottle, fitting it into a multistep routine so that its reader can get up the next day and carry on as normal, more perfect than before. 

I’m going to end this essay with links to some Palestinian writing (mostly fiction) that I’ve been reading. There is a lot of variety in the following. Some of these pieces of writing make me feel the kind of elated sense of possibility I talked about earlier. But more broadly, the existence of imaginative writing, produced in large part by writers facing both bodily danger and censorship, is its own retort to the kind of cozily contained and defanged ideal of the fictional I’m critiquing here, which makes it, I think, a good place to end.

1. https://arablit.org/2024/01/09/a-curated-list-of-20-palestinian-short-stories-in-translation-online/ From Arab Lit

2. https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2024-01/against-silence-palestinian-writing-lena-khalaf-tuffaha/ 

3. https://www.guernicamag.com/voices-on-palestine/